Would you build a company based on trust? That’s what social entrepreneur Marcela Torres set out to do when she launched her Mexico City-based startup that paid young people to learn to code. No one believed she could do it, until she did.

Martina: Marcela was at the hostel to study young immigrants from Central America, but her encounter with this man inspired her to shift her focus. She would study young Mexicans who were returning from the U.S. and landing in a country they had never known or claimed as their own.

Martina: But she would help them get jobs in a pretty unusual way — by paying them to learn how to code.

Martina: Bienvenidos and welcome back to a new season of the Duolingo Spanish Podcast — I’m Martina Castro. Every episode, we bring you fascinating true stories to help you improve your Spanish listening and gain new perspectives on the world. The storyteller will be using intermediate Spanish and I will be chiming in for context in English. If you miss something, you can always skip back and listen again — and we also offer full transcripts at podcast.duolingo.com.

Martina: These days, Marcela Torres is an up and coming social entrepreneur that appears in magazines like Forbes. But the path that led her there starts back in 2011, before she met that young man who changed the course of her professional life.

Martina: That was also the year the Arab world was in the middle of a democratic revolution, largely led by young people using social media and other Internet tools to change their countries. This caught Marcela’s attention just around the time she was choosing a focus for her thesis.

Martina: She lived it when she went to her university's engineering department to ask a few questions. There she found a room full of men who said they were just too busy to help her. She felt dismissed and ignored.

Martina: Marcela finished her masters in Social Development and successfully learned how to code in HTML and JavaScript. Then in 2015, after a decade studying and working abroad, she returned to Mexico.

Martina: One day, a woman mentioned to her that she needed to hire 300 new programmers but could only find 10 qualified candidates. That’s when Marcela understood how desperate companies were to find this kind of talent. And it’s also when she met a man from France named Nicolás.

Martina: She thought this was contradictory — companies are part of the problem, not the solution, she told him. To convince her, Nicoláas got a grant from the Netherlands to design a company focused on creating jobs for young people.

Martina: This was the same young man from the beginning of the story. After meeting him, Marcela started doing workshops with people in their 20s and 30s, who had been deported from the U.S., or whose parents had been deported, forcing them to come along as well.

Martina: After they arrive in Mexico, their lives aren’t easy. Universities don’t let them transfer their credits from the U.S., often because their transcripts are in English and they don’t satisfy requirements built into the Mexican education system.

Martina: Marcela and Nicoláas would spend a year developing a for-profit company that would train immigrants returning to Mexico to be programmers. But here’s the catch — they would train them for free.

Marcela: El nombre de la empresa sería Hola Code.

Martina: Marcela and Nicoláas knew that their potential students at Hola Code didn’t have the money for the kind of training they wanted to offer them. So they knew the training would have to be free. But their company would go one step further.

Martina: Once the students got jobs, they would pay Hola Code back for the cost of their training. It was a business model built entirely on trust. Sounded great in theory, but the investors, los inversionistas, would need some convincing.

Martina: But Marcela’s idea continued to face sharp skepticism over the business model. They couldn’t understand how her bottom line depended on trust alone? They also thought it was backwards to pay the students a weekly salary... usually students pay YOU when you teach them.

Martina: And she strongly believed if they got jobs they would pay back the program, instead of taking the money and running, as the investors were implying. But Marcela got used to investors saying “no” to her idea.

Martina: And then, in the fall of 2017, she attended an important conference where she’d get to pitch investors from the U.S. There were many other entrepreneurs trying to sell their ideas there, too. Marcela pitched and once again, she wasn’t selected.

Martina: Marcela posted fliers at call centers. She invited potential students to information sessions. She even provided pizza and drinks. But if 30 people showed up, half of them would leave without asking any questions.

Martina: The students don’t see themselves quite that way. This Christmas they gave Marcela a pair of socks with the phrase “Mother of Dragons”, a reference to the fierce warrior queen on HBO’s Game of Thrones.

Martina: Marcela Torres is a social entrepreneur and cofounder of Hola Code along with Nicoláas Demeillers. This story was written by Emily Green, a freelance journalist based in Mexico City.

We’d love to know what you thought of this episode! Send us an email with your feedback at podcast@duolingo.com. And if you liked the story, please share it! You can find the audio and a transcript of each episode at podcast.duolingo.com. You can also subscribe at Apple Podcasts or your favorite listening app so you never miss an episode.

Duolingo is the world's leading language learning platform, and the #1 education app, with over 300 million users worldwide. Duolingo believes in making education free, fun and accessible to everyone. To join, download the app today, or find out more at duolingo.com. I’m the podcast’s executive producer, Martina Castro – gracias por escuchar.